This spring, a startup called Makara came out of stealth mode with a beta of a product called Cloud Application Platform, which as the name suggests allowed companies to set up private platform clouds like Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, or Engine Yard internally on their own iron. Today, Makara is doing something that will perhaps be more interesting, which is layering atop Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure cloud to turn it into a platform cloud.

Article Excerpt: Now that Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud can be brought to bear using the Cloud Application Platform, the set of monitoring and management tools that allow customers to manage their private clouds running atop Eucalyptus (KVM), Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (KVM), Red Hat KVM, and VMware vSphere hypervisors and cloud frameworks can now be used to manage EC2 images.

In fact, says Isaac Roth, co-founder and chief executive officer at Makara, the whole point of the Cloud Application Platform is to make the differences between a public cloud and private cloud moot and to abstract both up one layer so companies just worry about the services their applications need to run – a Web server, a database, and so forth – and leave the Makara system at work to manage how the underlying infrastructure is scaled up and down.